Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were the giants of 20th-century “existentialism”, although neither of them was comfortable with that title. Their famous differences aside, they shared a ...
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Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were the giants of 20th-century “existentialism”, although neither of them was comfortable with that title. Their famous differences aside, they shared a “phenomenological” sensibility and described personal experience in exquisite and excruciating detail and reflected on the meaning of this experience with both sensitivity and insight. That is the focus of this book: Camus and Sartre, their descriptions of personal experience, and their reflections on the meaning of this experience. They also reflected, worriedly, on the nature of reflection. The thematic problem of the book is the relationship between experience and reflection. The book explores this relationship through novels and plays, Camus’ The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, and Sartre’s great philosophical tome, Being and Nothingness.Less

Robert C. Solomon

Published in print: 2006-09-01

Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre were the giants of 20th-century “existentialism”, although neither of them was comfortable with that title. Their famous differences aside, they shared a “phenomenological” sensibility and described personal experience in exquisite and excruciating detail and reflected on the meaning of this experience with both sensitivity and insight. That is the focus of this book: Camus and Sartre, their descriptions of personal experience, and their reflections on the meaning of this experience. They also reflected, worriedly, on the nature of reflection. The thematic problem of the book is the relationship between experience and reflection. The book explores this relationship through novels and plays, Camus’ The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, Sartre’s Nausea and No Exit, and Sartre’s great philosophical tome, Being and Nothingness.

This chapter examines Jean-Paul Sartre's role in the history of the Jewish question in France. Despite not being an expert on Judaism and writing only occasionally on the topic, Sartre's 1946 ...
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This chapter examines Jean-Paul Sartre's role in the history of the Jewish question in France. Despite not being an expert on Judaism and writing only occasionally on the topic, Sartre's 1946 phenomenological essay on the anti-Semite and the Jew, Réflexions sur la question juive, had a profound impact on discourse about Jews and Jewish identity after World War II. Réflexions links the representation of Judaism in France to the nation's stuggle to determine political identity between the poles of universalism and particularism. The chapter first considers Sartre's investment in this debate and the role of the figural Jew in his treatment of the issue to show how the situation of the Jew comes to appear to Sartre as an intensification of the human situation and, thus, as a window into the stakes of existentialism. It then traces Sartre's engagement with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (particularly his philosophy of history) and how this influenced his representation of Judaism.Less

Stranger and Self: Sartre's Jew

Published in print: 2010-05-01

This chapter examines Jean-Paul Sartre's role in the history of the Jewish question in France. Despite not being an expert on Judaism and writing only occasionally on the topic, Sartre's 1946 phenomenological essay on the anti-Semite and the Jew, Réflexions sur la question juive, had a profound impact on discourse about Jews and Jewish identity after World War II. Réflexions links the representation of Judaism in France to the nation's stuggle to determine political identity between the poles of universalism and particularism. The chapter first considers Sartre's investment in this debate and the role of the figural Jew in his treatment of the issue to show how the situation of the Jew comes to appear to Sartre as an intensification of the human situation and, thus, as a window into the stakes of existentialism. It then traces Sartre's engagement with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (particularly his philosophy of history) and how this influenced his representation of Judaism.

This chapter describes the gradual discrediting of the notion of genius. In France in the 1950s, contemporaneously with the Minou Drouet affair, it became the object of a powerful cultural critique ...
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This chapter describes the gradual discrediting of the notion of genius. In France in the 1950s, contemporaneously with the Minou Drouet affair, it became the object of a powerful cultural critique under the aegis of literary theory, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes—more or less simultaneously—portrayed it as an anachronistic legacy from the previous century, and denounced it as a one of the myths that lay at the heart of bourgeois ideology. Two of Barthes's texts in Mythologies (1957) specifically target genius—one devoted to Einstein's brain, and the other to Minou Drouet. Much the same goes for Sartre, whose autobiography, Les Mots, begun in 1953 (and finally published in 1964), targets genius and the child prodigy as central components of his farewell to literature.Less

Cultural Critique and the End of Genius : Barthes, Sartre

Ann Jefferson

Published in print: 2014-12-21

This chapter describes the gradual discrediting of the notion of genius. In France in the 1950s, contemporaneously with the Minou Drouet affair, it became the object of a powerful cultural critique under the aegis of literary theory, when Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes—more or less simultaneously—portrayed it as an anachronistic legacy from the previous century, and denounced it as a one of the myths that lay at the heart of bourgeois ideology. Two of Barthes's texts in Mythologies (1957) specifically target genius—one devoted to Einstein's brain, and the other to Minou Drouet. Much the same goes for Sartre, whose autobiography, Les Mots, begun in 1953 (and finally published in 1964), targets genius and the child prodigy as central components of his farewell to literature.

How far can reading the Greeks politically get us? This concluding chapter questions whether an innovative approach to the political — a new theory of democracy — has emerged from the French post-war ...
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How far can reading the Greeks politically get us? This concluding chapter questions whether an innovative approach to the political — a new theory of democracy — has emerged from the French post-war encounter with 5th century Athens. Did post-war France rediscover Greece in the shadow of German tyranny to write the script of a truly emancipatory politics for the future? Can one see beyond the humanist appropriation of classical culture or is the return to antiquity inevitably a revisiting of the worst exclusionary narratives of the enlightenment? The chapter contrasts the reception of antiquity in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre with the later investment in the classical past explored in this book.Less

Epilogue: Reception and the Political

Miriam Leonard

Published in print: 2005-10-06

How far can reading the Greeks politically get us? This concluding chapter questions whether an innovative approach to the political — a new theory of democracy — has emerged from the French post-war encounter with 5th century Athens. Did post-war France rediscover Greece in the shadow of German tyranny to write the script of a truly emancipatory politics for the future? Can one see beyond the humanist appropriation of classical culture or is the return to antiquity inevitably a revisiting of the worst exclusionary narratives of the enlightenment? The chapter contrasts the reception of antiquity in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre with the later investment in the classical past explored in this book.

Jean-Paul Sartre's treatise Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) is one of the strangest books ever to be written by a reputable philosopher. It is about a far more outlandish figure than Immanuel ...
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Jean-Paul Sartre's treatise Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) is one of the strangest books ever to be written by a reputable philosopher. It is about a far more outlandish figure than Immanuel Kant's Swedenborg: Jean Genet, ex-jailbird and self-confessed thief, pederast, prostitute, and stoolpigeon. Genet's sumptuously obscene celebrations of evil, in a prose whose preciosity recalls Marcel Proust and Jean Giraudoux, have made him, since the end of World War II, the rage of Parisian literary circles. And Sartre's intensely, sometimes comically serious discussion of Genet is a dazzling display of dialectic, ending with what Sartre calls “a request that Jean Genet be well treated.” The truth is that Sartre was preoccupied in those years with the problems of an Existentialist ethics; and in the figure of Genet, he found a pretext for developing certain ideas on good and evil which had not hitherto found expression in his theoretical writings. Genet's work is a gigantic glorification of vice and crime, a willful inversion of all normal ethical standards.Less

Sartre: An Existentialist in the Underworld

Joseph Frank

Published in print: 2012-06-12

Jean-Paul Sartre's treatise Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) is one of the strangest books ever to be written by a reputable philosopher. It is about a far more outlandish figure than Immanuel Kant's Swedenborg: Jean Genet, ex-jailbird and self-confessed thief, pederast, prostitute, and stoolpigeon. Genet's sumptuously obscene celebrations of evil, in a prose whose preciosity recalls Marcel Proust and Jean Giraudoux, have made him, since the end of World War II, the rage of Parisian literary circles. And Sartre's intensely, sometimes comically serious discussion of Genet is a dazzling display of dialectic, ending with what Sartre calls “a request that Jean Genet be well treated.” The truth is that Sartre was preoccupied in those years with the problems of an Existentialist ethics; and in the figure of Genet, he found a pretext for developing certain ideas on good and evil which had not hitherto found expression in his theoretical writings. Genet's work is a gigantic glorification of vice and crime, a willful inversion of all normal ethical standards.

This book engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a ...
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This book engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. The book both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the music they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns. The text positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, it introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work.Less

The Philosopher's Touch : Sartre, Nietzsche, and Barthes at the Piano

François Noudelmann

Published in print: 2014-11-11

This book engages the musicality of Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Roland Barthes, all of whom were amateur piano players and acute lovers of the medium. Though piano playing was a crucial art for these thinkers, their musings on the subject are largely scant, implicit, or discordant with each philosopher's oeuvre. The book both recovers and integrates these perspectives, showing that the manner in which these philosophers played, the composers they adored, and the music they chose reveals uncommon insight into their thinking styles and patterns. The text positions the physical and theoretical practice of music as a dimension underpinning and resonating with Sartre's, Nietzsche's, and Barthes's unique philosophical outlook. By reading their thought against their music, it introduces new critical formulations and reorients their trajectories, adding invaluable richness to these philosophers' lived and embodied experiences. The result heightens the multiple registers of being and the relationship between philosophy and the senses that informed so much of their work.

This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary ...
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This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary portraiture, imaginary self‐portraiture, and aesthetic autobiography figure in experiments in life‐writing by two authors coming after modernism: Jean‐Paul Sartre in Les Mots, and Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory. The second section sketches ways in which postmodernism has drawn upon and extended the tradition of experimentations with life‐writing. Here the emphasis is on metafictional strategies, especially those of auto/biografiction and imaginary authorship. Auto/biografiction can be understood as a strand of what Linda Hutcheon defines as ‘historiographic metafiction’, focusing on the representations of individual life stories rather than on representations of historical crises or trauma. Modernist works explicitly thematizing their own processes of representation (such as Orlando or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) are reconsidered as pioneers of the postmodern development that might be termed ‘auto/biographic metafiction’. Key examples discussed are A. S. Byatt's Possession (as biographic metafiction); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (as autobiographic metafiction) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (as auto/biographic metafiction). Where historiographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of the historical novel, auto/biographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of auto/biography.Less

Max Saunders

Published in print: 2010-03-18

This shorter chapter is a coda considering the afterlife of modernism's engagements with life‐writings covered in Part II. It begins by sketching how the ideas traced in this study of imaginary portraiture, imaginary self‐portraiture, and aesthetic autobiography figure in experiments in life‐writing by two authors coming after modernism: Jean‐Paul Sartre in Les Mots, and Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory. The second section sketches ways in which postmodernism has drawn upon and extended the tradition of experimentations with life‐writing. Here the emphasis is on metafictional strategies, especially those of auto/biografiction and imaginary authorship. Auto/biografiction can be understood as a strand of what Linda Hutcheon defines as ‘historiographic metafiction’, focusing on the representations of individual life stories rather than on representations of historical crises or trauma. Modernist works explicitly thematizing their own processes of representation (such as Orlando or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas) are reconsidered as pioneers of the postmodern development that might be termed ‘auto/biographic metafiction’. Key examples discussed are A. S. Byatt's Possession (as biographic metafiction); Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (as autobiographic metafiction) and Nabokov's Pale Fire (as auto/biographic metafiction). Where historiographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of the historical novel, auto/biographic metafiction represents a postmodernizing of auto/biography.

This chapter examines the Christian existentialist challenge to Jean-Paul Sartre and the Paris school of existentialism, and how Christian thinkers viewed the functionalist understanding of the ...
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This chapter examines the Christian existentialist challenge to Jean-Paul Sartre and the Paris school of existentialism, and how Christian thinkers viewed the functionalist understanding of the relation to the other that Sartre articulated. It first considers how Sartre characterized existentialism in his public lecture of 1945, “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” before turning to his Existentialism Is a Humanism and Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus. It then discusses the response of Marxists and Catholics to Sartre’s brand of existentialism and traces the lineage within French thought that was a precursor of the postwar generation’s discussions of subjectivity, freedom, morality, and the purpose of human existence. The chapter also highlights the antecedents and interlocutors among a clutch of writers and artists—the Paris school of existentialism—whose work came to characterize the most audacious and challenging claims of existentialism in the postwar period.Less

Sisyphus’s Progeny : Existentialism in France

Jonathan Judaken

Published in print: 2012-06-05

This chapter examines the Christian existentialist challenge to Jean-Paul Sartre and the Paris school of existentialism, and how Christian thinkers viewed the functionalist understanding of the relation to the other that Sartre articulated. It first considers how Sartre characterized existentialism in his public lecture of 1945, “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” before turning to his Existentialism Is a Humanism and Albert Camus’s essay The Myth of Sisyphus. It then discusses the response of Marxists and Catholics to Sartre’s brand of existentialism and traces the lineage within French thought that was a precursor of the postwar generation’s discussions of subjectivity, freedom, morality, and the purpose of human existence. The chapter also highlights the antecedents and interlocutors among a clutch of writers and artists—the Paris school of existentialism—whose work came to characterize the most audacious and challenging claims of existentialism in the postwar period.

This first chapter presents an in-depth study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s career-long engagement with Mallarmé. Beginning with a discussion of Sartre’s notorious side-lining of poetry in favour of ...
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This first chapter presents an in-depth study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s career-long engagement with Mallarmé. Beginning with a discussion of Sartre’s notorious side-lining of poetry in favour of committed literature, the chapter asks why Sartre nevertheless chose to devote so many pages to Mallarmé, particularly in his incomplete existential biography Mallarmé, or, The Poet of Nothingness. The chapter begins with an extensive reading of this latter work, tracking Sartre’s trenchant Marxist analysis of the post-1848 literary field in France before exploring his account of Mallarmé’s personal trajectory. Finally, it turns to the third volume of Sartre’s The Family Idiot and argues for the consistency of Sartre’s reading of Mallarmé as a nihilist and as a political quietist. Less

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Mallarmé: Hero of an Ontological Drama, Agent of the Counter-revolution

Robert Boncardo

Published in print: 2018-03-01

This first chapter presents an in-depth study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s career-long engagement with Mallarmé. Beginning with a discussion of Sartre’s notorious side-lining of poetry in favour of committed literature, the chapter asks why Sartre nevertheless chose to devote so many pages to Mallarmé, particularly in his incomplete existential biography Mallarmé, or, The Poet of Nothingness. The chapter begins with an extensive reading of this latter work, tracking Sartre’s trenchant Marxist analysis of the post-1848 literary field in France before exploring his account of Mallarmé’s personal trajectory. Finally, it turns to the third volume of Sartre’s The Family Idiot and argues for the consistency of Sartre’s reading of Mallarmé as a nihilist and as a political quietist.

Chapter Six considers to what extent Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive [Anti-Semite and Jew], written at the end of WWII, represents a turning point in the history of French ...
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Chapter Six considers to what extent Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive [Anti-Semite and Jew], written at the end of WWII, represents a turning point in the history of French thinking about the Jews and the universal. Sartre offers a blistering critique of republican universalism both for its tepid defense of the Jews and for demanding that Jews assimilate. Sartre’s famous call for Jews to become “authentic" and for French people to accept their difference, represents an explicit rejection of the republican universalist paradigm and a major pendulum swing toward pluralism. And yet, Sartre has difficulty leaving universalism behind: at the end of the text, he winds up replacing the republican universal with a Marxist one that is no less opposed to Jewish difference. This chapter explores these paradoxes within Sartre's text but ultimately suggests that the text's real significance lies in the way that it inspired French Jews to affirm their difference in later years.Less

Sartre’s “Jewish Question”

Maurice Samuels

Published in print: 2016-11-02

Chapter Six considers to what extent Jean-Paul Sartre’s Réflexions sur la question juive [Anti-Semite and Jew], written at the end of WWII, represents a turning point in the history of French thinking about the Jews and the universal. Sartre offers a blistering critique of republican universalism both for its tepid defense of the Jews and for demanding that Jews assimilate. Sartre’s famous call for Jews to become “authentic" and for French people to accept their difference, represents an explicit rejection of the republican universalist paradigm and a major pendulum swing toward pluralism. And yet, Sartre has difficulty leaving universalism behind: at the end of the text, he winds up replacing the republican universal with a Marxist one that is no less opposed to Jewish difference. This chapter explores these paradoxes within Sartre's text but ultimately suggests that the text's real significance lies in the way that it inspired French Jews to affirm their difference in later years.

This chapter examines evidence showing that Jean-Paul Sartre was interested in music. It begins by perusing the many studies that Sartre devoted to the arts, including matiériste painting, kinetic ...
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This chapter examines evidence showing that Jean-Paul Sartre was interested in music. It begins by perusing the many studies that Sartre devoted to the arts, including matiériste painting, kinetic sculpture, photojournalism, popular cinema, African poetry, and the American novel. Sartre wrote only belatedly about the music of his own century. But it wasn't until the 1970s that he wrote more generally about the modern composers who were at the heart of contemporary debates. Sartre also listened to comic operas. This chapter considers how Sartre plays Frédéric-François Chopin; his Romanticism and how he plays the piano; his views on hallucinations and dreams; his playing the piano as an escape from reality; his political activism; and how he used music to resist science, morality, and power—the three pillars of bourgeois humanism. It also analyzes the rhythm evident in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison).Less

The Off-Beat Piano

François Noudelmann

Published in print: 2014-11-11

This chapter examines evidence showing that Jean-Paul Sartre was interested in music. It begins by perusing the many studies that Sartre devoted to the arts, including matiériste painting, kinetic sculpture, photojournalism, popular cinema, African poetry, and the American novel. Sartre wrote only belatedly about the music of his own century. But it wasn't until the 1970s that he wrote more generally about the modern composers who were at the heart of contemporary debates. Sartre also listened to comic operas. This chapter considers how Sartre plays Frédéric-François Chopin; his Romanticism and how he plays the piano; his views on hallucinations and dreams; his playing the piano as an escape from reality; his political activism; and how he used music to resist science, morality, and power—the three pillars of bourgeois humanism. It also analyzes the rhythm evident in Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (Critique de la raison).

The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War ...
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The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War II, a number of prominent French philosophers recast this maligned figure in positive terms, and in so doing transformed postwar conceptions of politics and identity. This book explores this figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Sartre and Levinas idealized the Jews' rootlessness in order to rethink the foundations of political identity. Blanchot and Derrida, in turn, used the figure of the Jew to call into question the very nature of group identification. By chronicling this evolution in thinking, this book ultimately reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms.Less

The Figural Jew : Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought

Sarah Hammerschlag

Published in print: 2010-05-01

The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War II, a number of prominent French philosophers recast this maligned figure in positive terms, and in so doing transformed postwar conceptions of politics and identity. This book explores this figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Sartre and Levinas idealized the Jews' rootlessness in order to rethink the foundations of political identity. Blanchot and Derrida, in turn, used the figure of the Jew to call into question the very nature of group identification. By chronicling this evolution in thinking, this book ultimately reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms.

The aim of this essay is to account for the anti-Semitism harboured and expressed by Danny Balint, the main character in Henry Bean’s film, The Believer. I begin by considering two kinds of ...
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The aim of this essay is to account for the anti-Semitism harboured and expressed by Danny Balint, the main character in Henry Bean’s film, The Believer. I begin by considering two kinds of explanation that Danny himself offers: one focusing on rational argument, the other on non-rational, emotional grounds. I argue that neither of Danny’s expressed accounts, however, emerges as adequate to understanding his hatred of the Jews. Instead, I offer a more fundamental and inclusive account of Danny’s anti-Semitism, one that focuses not just on the accounts he gives, but rather on constructing an account from a number of diverse, even contradictory, claims that he makes. I argue that the thread running through Danny’s anti-Semitic attitudes is the link that, for him, exists between the Jews, Judaism, and various forms of meaninglessness.Less

Reason, Absurdity, and Anti-Semitism in the believer

Tom Martin

Published in print: 2011-01-07

The aim of this essay is to account for the anti-Semitism harboured and expressed by Danny Balint, the main character in Henry Bean’s film, The Believer. I begin by considering two kinds of explanation that Danny himself offers: one focusing on rational argument, the other on non-rational, emotional grounds. I argue that neither of Danny’s expressed accounts, however, emerges as adequate to understanding his hatred of the Jews. Instead, I offer a more fundamental and inclusive account of Danny’s anti-Semitism, one that focuses not just on the accounts he gives, but rather on constructing an account from a number of diverse, even contradictory, claims that he makes. I argue that the thread running through Danny’s anti-Semitic attitudes is the link that, for him, exists between the Jews, Judaism, and various forms of meaninglessness.

This chapter takes as its point of departure the critic George Steiner’s citation of the café as an essential marker of the idea of Europe. It then reviews the café’s place in Paris as part of an ...
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This chapter takes as its point of departure the critic George Steiner’s citation of the café as an essential marker of the idea of Europe. It then reviews the café’s place in Paris as part of an image of European cosmopolitanism and as a forum in which discourse about Europe was produced. It then considers the implications of the centrality of the café for non-European Parisian residents given the institution’s putative quintessential Europeanness. Here particular attention is paid to Algerians and black Americans. Further, the serenity of the café is juxtaposed to the experience of violence that often underscored discourse about Europe, particularly in regard to the Algerian war of decolonisation and the Cold War. Finally, the chapter considers the function of the café in the image of Jean-Paul Sartre, and its connection to his output on the question of Europe.Less

The Paris Café as a Europeanising Space

Hugh McDonnell

Published in print: 2016-07-01

This chapter takes as its point of departure the critic George Steiner’s citation of the café as an essential marker of the idea of Europe. It then reviews the café’s place in Paris as part of an image of European cosmopolitanism and as a forum in which discourse about Europe was produced. It then considers the implications of the centrality of the café for non-European Parisian residents given the institution’s putative quintessential Europeanness. Here particular attention is paid to Algerians and black Americans. Further, the serenity of the café is juxtaposed to the experience of violence that often underscored discourse about Europe, particularly in regard to the Algerian war of decolonisation and the Cold War. Finally, the chapter considers the function of the café in the image of Jean-Paul Sartre, and its connection to his output on the question of Europe.

This chapter looks at Sartre’s attempt to build on the thinking of Heidegger and Gide to develop a robust, humanist ethics of authenticity. The chapter theorizes the role that desire and waste play ...
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This chapter looks at Sartre’s attempt to build on the thinking of Heidegger and Gide to develop a robust, humanist ethics of authenticity. The chapter theorizes the role that desire and waste play in Sartrean authenticity, and argues for a clear distinction between Sartre’s relation to theism and his relation to religion. Despite the atheistic bent of Sartre’s thinking, the chapter argues, the ascetic element of authenticity remains: the self is free to the extent that it continues to choose itself, to make up for not choosing, and to be the product of this labor.Less

The Infinite Mission

Noreen Khawaja

Published in print: 2016-12-02

This chapter looks at Sartre’s attempt to build on the thinking of Heidegger and Gide to develop a robust, humanist ethics of authenticity. The chapter theorizes the role that desire and waste play in Sartrean authenticity, and argues for a clear distinction between Sartre’s relation to theism and his relation to religion. Despite the atheistic bent of Sartre’s thinking, the chapter argues, the ascetic element of authenticity remains: the self is free to the extent that it continues to choose itself, to make up for not choosing, and to be the product of this labor.

This chapter, which examines Jean-Paul Satre's reading of the works of Paul Klee in the context of surrealism and conception of consciousness, highlights Sarte's criticisms on the surrealists ...
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This chapter, which examines Jean-Paul Satre's reading of the works of Paul Klee in the context of surrealism and conception of consciousness, highlights Sarte's criticisms on the surrealists influenced by Klee and explains that he found the same “error” that he had found in Klee. It argues that Klee's links with surrealism were immediate and far-reaching, and that from the start he sought a fusion between the architectonic and the poetic in his art and writings.Less

Of Sartre, Klee, Surrealism, and Philosophy : Toward a “Nonprosaic” Conception of Consciousness

Published in print: 2009-09-23

This chapter, which examines Jean-Paul Satre's reading of the works of Paul Klee in the context of surrealism and conception of consciousness, highlights Sarte's criticisms on the surrealists influenced by Klee and explains that he found the same “error” that he had found in Klee. It argues that Klee's links with surrealism were immediate and far-reaching, and that from the start he sought a fusion between the architectonic and the poetic in his art and writings.

This chapter examines Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenological analysis of racism as a system. In 1952, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which became the defining text of what today is called the ...
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This chapter examines Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenological analysis of racism as a system. In 1952, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which became the defining text of what today is called the critical philosophy of race. Black Skin, White Masks is an original work of philosophy in its own right that moves beyond the responses to racism provided by the previous generation of black authors, which included Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. The chapter explores what moves Fanon’s existentialism from the realm of personal testimony to a philosophy with strong political implications, as well as his engagement with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. It also traces the evolution of Fanon’s writing on race with his first published work, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” together with his effort to formulate a response to the impasses of his earlier position and to racism more generally. Fanon’s seminal insight was to see racism interweaved with its institutionalized forms in colonialism, which meant that racism could be overcome only through a violent revolt against that system of oppression. In this, Fanon and Sartre walked parallel roads to freedom.Less

Situating Frantz Fanon’s Account of Black Experience

Robert Bernasconi

Published in print: 2012-06-05

This chapter examines Frantz Fanon’s existential phenomenological analysis of racism as a system. In 1952, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, which became the defining text of what today is called the critical philosophy of race. Black Skin, White Masks is an original work of philosophy in its own right that moves beyond the responses to racism provided by the previous generation of black authors, which included Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. The chapter explores what moves Fanon’s existentialism from the realm of personal testimony to a philosophy with strong political implications, as well as his engagement with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre. It also traces the evolution of Fanon’s writing on race with his first published work, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” together with his effort to formulate a response to the impasses of his earlier position and to racism more generally. Fanon’s seminal insight was to see racism interweaved with its institutionalized forms in colonialism, which meant that racism could be overcome only through a violent revolt against that system of oppression. In this, Fanon and Sartre walked parallel roads to freedom.

This chapter analyses the role of the discussion of hallucination in the development and direction of such theory represented by Jean-Paul Sartre's The Psychology of Imagination and Maurice ...
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This chapter analyses the role of the discussion of hallucination in the development and direction of such theory represented by Jean-Paul Sartre's The Psychology of Imagination and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It looks at how their accounts of hallucination prove crucial to overcoming the rationalist/empiricist hiatus that the phenomenological approach aims to accomplish. The chapter also discusses the importance of an account of hallucination in Sartre's general theory of consciousness and his own philosophical commitment to the basic premises of Husserlian phenomenology.Less

Hallucinating Sartre

Dave Boothroyd

Published in print: 2006-12-31

This chapter analyses the role of the discussion of hallucination in the development and direction of such theory represented by Jean-Paul Sartre's The Psychology of Imagination and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. It looks at how their accounts of hallucination prove crucial to overcoming the rationalist/empiricist hiatus that the phenomenological approach aims to accomplish. The chapter also discusses the importance of an account of hallucination in Sartre's general theory of consciousness and his own philosophical commitment to the basic premises of Husserlian phenomenology.

Chapter 5 is the book’s central literary study. It “slow reads” Frantz Fanon’s epochal essay “The Lived Experience of the Black” as a critical dramatization of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land). Reconstructing the full literary and philosophical context of the essay, the chapter argues that Fanon’s riposte to Jean-Paul Sartre’s misreading of the primitivism of the negritude poets consists of himself enacting Césaire’s primitivism. In Fanon reading Césaire, we observe literary primitivism achieving consciousness of itself as a historical phenomenon. The chapter argues for the centrality of Césaire’s achievement to literary primitivism, at the heart of which lies a poetics of passionate sarcasm.Less

Césaire, Fanon, and Immediacy as a Project

Ben Etherington

Published in print: 2017-12-26

Chapter 5 is the book’s central literary study. It “slow reads” Frantz Fanon’s epochal essay “The Lived Experience of the Black” as a critical dramatization of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land). Reconstructing the full literary and philosophical context of the essay, the chapter argues that Fanon’s riposte to Jean-Paul Sartre’s misreading of the primitivism of the negritude poets consists of himself enacting Césaire’s primitivism. In Fanon reading Césaire, we observe literary primitivism achieving consciousness of itself as a historical phenomenon. The chapter argues for the centrality of Césaire’s achievement to literary primitivism, at the heart of which lies a poetics of passionate sarcasm.

It is a curious and little-known fact that the largest existentialist scene outside of Europe was in the Middle East. For two long decades, from the end of World War II until the late 1960s, ...
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It is a curious and little-known fact that the largest existentialist scene outside of Europe was in the Middle East. For two long decades, from the end of World War II until the late 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre was the uncontested champion of the Arab intelligentsia. Sartre’s existentialist philosophy nourished the post-colonial Arab quest for a new Arab subjectivity, or, as they called it, a “New Arab Man.” Sartre’s political writing manifested itself in unflinching support for the cause of Third Worldism, thus framing the liberationist struggle against neo-colonialism, imperialism and Zionism. His influence on Arab thought and action and his two-way relationship with an important circle of Arab thinkers was therefore very significant. By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, No Exit reconstructs the forgotten global milieu of the post-colonial Arab generation. Drawing extensively on new Arabic and Hebrew archival sources, No Exit examines the multiple cultural functions of Arab existentialism and, especially, the rise and fall of the relationship between Jean Paul Sartre and Arab intellectuals due to Sartre’s decision to side with Israel on the eve of the 1967 war.Less

No Exit : Arab Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Decolonization

Yoav Di-Capua

Published in print: 2018-04-06

It is a curious and little-known fact that the largest existentialist scene outside of Europe was in the Middle East. For two long decades, from the end of World War II until the late 1960s, Jean-Paul Sartre was the uncontested champion of the Arab intelligentsia. Sartre’s existentialist philosophy nourished the post-colonial Arab quest for a new Arab subjectivity, or, as they called it, a “New Arab Man.” Sartre’s political writing manifested itself in unflinching support for the cause of Third Worldism, thus framing the liberationist struggle against neo-colonialism, imperialism and Zionism. His influence on Arab thought and action and his two-way relationship with an important circle of Arab thinkers was therefore very significant. By closely following the remarkable career of Arab existentialism, No Exit reconstructs the forgotten global milieu of the post-colonial Arab generation. Drawing extensively on new Arabic and Hebrew archival sources, No Exit examines the multiple cultural functions of Arab existentialism and, especially, the rise and fall of the relationship between Jean Paul Sartre and Arab intellectuals due to Sartre’s decision to side with Israel on the eve of the 1967 war.